Dr. Whom
Frightening Fanatic of Horrible Cinema
Karma: 114
Posts: 1591
Cthulhu for president! Why choose the lesser evil?
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« on: February 19, 2007, 01:24:43 PM » |
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This movie is truly amazing. While it is shot in 2000, for Jean Rollin time has evidently stopped in 1973 or thereabouts. Everything, the imagery, the acting style, the special effects (!), the pink letters of the credits, down to the funky apricot coloured shirt of the Professor comes straight out of the seventies.
On the other hand, one can wonder if Jean Rollin wasn’t parodying himself. In fact, what to think of a Dracula who rises from his coffin in the best Hammer style, yet gets about by teleporting through a grandfather clock. Also his fiancee is so crazy that she infects the nuns who are guarding her (and use all the stock clichés of madmen in French cartoons of the seventies, down to wearing funnels for hats). Or, as Mother Superior remarks in the end: we’re all crazy, but our mission is accomplished. One of the nuns also has a hidden talent as a belly dancer, and is accordingly renamed Soeur Folies Bergères.
Yet the movie seems to take itself seriously, with a very poetic diction (including a recurrent use of a famous phrase of the surrealists) and the use of ‘disturbing’ imagery (disturbing to an audience of 1973 that is). The whole thing has a quite solemn arthouse atmosphere, as if it wanted to say Something Important about the Dark Impulses of Man. Perhaps it might have if it made any sense.
And yes, there is a fair bit of nudity.
So, as for the plot: The Professor and his trusty helper Eric are trying to track down Dracula, by following a midget buffoon who has an affair with a vampire in a cemetary (interestingly, the midget wears his cap with bells, while roaming cemetaries at night). He points them towards the Madwoman of the Tower, who reveals that Dracula’s fiancee is kept by nuns in Paris. It turns out that Isabelle, the fiancee is so crazy that she has infected the nuns. The Professor helps Isabelle to escape, in the hope that she will lead him to Dracula. However, his plans are crossed by the Forces of Evil (ie, the Vampire, the Buffoon, a Sorcerer, an Old Crone, and the Madwoman who turns out to be a part time Ogress). They invoke Dracula, helped by the She-Wolf (Brigitte Lahaie!) and a girl in a coffin who plays the violin. In the process, three nuns get sacrificed, the Ogress gets shot and the Vampire falls in a well. Dracula duly materialises in his clock, and gives his consent, so Isabelle is driven to his lair. He is kept prisoner on an island by another branch of the same order of nuns, but nobody knows the exact location. The Professor has established telepathic contact with Isabelle and is in hot pursuit.
It all ends in a climactic scene on the beach, where the Professor is eaten by the Ogress and the Vampire, Eric is shut in Dracula’s tomb, the Buffoon, Crone, Vampire and Ogress are killed by the nuns and Dracula and Isabelle are reunited in the clock.
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